Abstract
This doctoral project aims to substantiate and qualify scholarly claims about literature's ethical potential through empirical research among readers. Previous reader response studies have found modest positive results, signalling, among other things, that literary texts can make readers more attuned to taking another person's perspective (e.g. Hakemulder 1998) and can lead to better self-understanding (e.g. Miall & Kuiken, 2002). The main textual features that these effects are commonly ascribed to are 'point of view' (or 'focalization'; e.g. Van Peer & Pander Maat, 1996) and metaphoric language (Kuiken, Miall & Sikora, 2004). The present project seeks to take multiple features of previous reader response studies into account: not only point of view and metaphors, but also crucial subject variables like gender and personality characteristics, and the contextual influence of the text's 'status' (is it 'high literature'?). These different aspects can all be expected to have an impact on emotional, intellectual and ethical reactions to a text. The proposed study consists of a series of experiments on reader responses to narratives of suffering, followed by a longitudinal qualitative study on the same subject. In the experiments, excerpts from novels will be used, while participants in the qualitative study will be required to read several novels completely. Suffering includes both mental and physical pain. Specifically, these texts will be about rape, torture, and mental illness. Texts on suffering can be expected to elicit strong emotional and ethical responses, both positive and negative. The study will compare responses to 'highly valued' literary texts with responses to popular non-fiction texts by less critically valued authors, and to a control-group of self-made informative texts with roughly the same information. The following general questions will be addressed: which personality characteristics and which features in the narratives (content and form) make people more responsive to narrative texts on suffering? How is the relation between various emotional responses (from empathy to disgust) and personal resonance to a text, and what impact does this have on ethical and/or intellectual reflection?